“Back in the USSR we were behind the iron curtain. There was nowhere to run to, not Europe, not America. But we had this absolute belief that if we could just somehow make a tiny hole in the curtain and reach through it far enough to knock on the door of the United Nations and say Hey! It’s us, we’re here, the Crimean Tatars! This is what’s happening to us… then the world would listen, because right was on our side. We knew in the 1980s Soviet Union we could go to prison or be locked up in a psychiatric hospital; we could be sentenced to three years for just ‘thinking of harm to the Soviet Union’. But no one just disappeared forever, or was later found dead, like now in Crimea. There wasn’t this dread of vanishing, of being left with the terrible not-knowing. There wasn’t any fear of not being heard, if we could just make that little hole and reach through…

Now there is no iron curtain. We can reach out whenever we like to the United Nations, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and say Hey! Here we are, the Crimean Tatars, this is what’s happening to us… And it makes no difference. No one can or wants to do anything.”